Amadeus picks VMware Integrated OpenStack for private cloud

The OpenStack cloud will be flexible, scalable, and useful for agile development, the company says.

But ultimately the company will be counting customer satisfaction as the main metric for success.

"If you look into the whole situation from the customer perspective, customers demand from us a certain level of service stability, they expect a certain level of agility, to be able to bring in changes, and for a certain cost ratio," he says. "Those are basically the parameters that steer our activities. If we cannot reach, for example, our system stability targets, we would not go for deploying a technology that would jeopardise this target. It's all linked to those commitments we make to customers and how a technology such as OpenStack can support it.

"It's all broken down from there, and so it needs to be seen in conjunction with those contractual commitments."

There will be some challenges ahead -- Amadeus is running a lot of software that will need to be migrated to newer technology stacks. It also faces industry-specific demands in terms of system monitoring. "You can imagine off-the-shelf tools more often than not do not satisfy the requirements we have, so we have to build a lot of this stuff ourselves," he says.